Not to get hyper about this, but today's intro is about a usage by Anglos and heteros (as well as nymphos in their minis) that is going not just super but mega before it flames out as retro.
My fixation today is on the separatist rebellion of the prefixes. These former modifiers, once comfortable affixed modestly to the front of a word, have taken on a nominative life of their own. Everybody wants to be a noun. As a result, we are marching into meta.
In assessing Letters From New Orleans, by Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine, the Times reviewer noted how the author was "parsing irony levels" and observed, "It can get a bit meta." At which a reader, Alice AvRutick, wondered: "Am vaguely aware that the sense of the prefix meta has metamorphed into metadata, but what does that stand-alone meta mean?"
"It is a prefix meaning `among, after, behind' and especially `beyond,'" replies the reviewer, Kate Sekules.
"I think it suggests the experience in question may be digested on more than one level. As distinct from the early 1990s' `ironic,' it has no pejorative tinge. Also, to get really pretentious, meta is a kind of conceptual word, perfect for a review of a book by the guy who analyzes consumers' unconscious motives," she says.
What did meta prefix before it learned to stand alone? Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster takes us back to Aristotle's Metaphysics, "beyond the physical realm," in which a subject beyond empirical evidence is the beginning of theory.
Getting a promotion
"It's clear to me that meta is in a category of prefixes that have been `promoted' to free-form status once their portability increases," he says.
In 1960, metafiction popped up, describing self-referential novels that dealt with the writing of fiction. This self-reflexive vogue, labeled meta-analysis, was gleefully seized upon by the lit-crit set as an addition to the jargon known as criticspeak.
Not every critic is entranced (or, to get with it, ensorcelled) by such nattering of novelistic narcissism.
"Meta is part of the unearned irony of the improperly educated postmodern crowd," opines Roger Kimball, an editor of The New Criterion.
"It's verbal shorthand that expresses not a depth but an absence of thought. You'll find it in the slums of contemporary literary and art criticism," he says.
In a New York Times Magazine article three years ago, Laura Miller defined metafiction as "fiction that openly admits it is an artificial creation -- as opposed to naturalism, in which art strives to represent real life."
The title aptly mocked literary self-absorption: "This Is a Headline for an Essay About Meta." The meta craze in criticism soon reached a point of parody about self-conscious parody. On Salon.com (I found it on Metacrawler, a Diogenic searcher of search engines), Stephanie Zacharek reviewed the 2002 film Adaptation, calling it a "massively self-indulgent metamovie," adding that "if you're so meta that you're completely unimpressed with how meta it is, then you are only reinforcing the movie's point: You've been so meta-consumed by metaculture that you're no longer able to take pleasure in art."
Rarely do any of us in the language dodge find it possible to salute a lexicographer who was prescient about a linguistic development a full generation in advance. In an article in the New Republic of Sept. 5, 1988, titled "Meta Musings," David Justice, then editor for pronunciation and etymology at Merriam-Webster, was quoted as saying, "Meta is currently the fashionable prefix." The writer, Noam Cohen, added: "He predicts that, like retro -- whose use solely as a prefix is so, well, retro -- meta could become independent from other words, as in, `Wow, this sentence is so meta.' If so, you heard it from me first."
LIMBO IN LIMBO
A Lebanese-born German brought a lawsuit against the CIA, the Daily Telegraph reported in Britain, "accusing it of holding him in limbo for five months."
"One free agent who remained in limbo as the deadline approached," reported a sportswriter for Knight Ridder newspapers, "was St. Louis Cardinals starter Matt Morris."
"O! what a sympathy of woe is this," said Shakespeare's Titus, "as far from help as Limbo is from bliss!"
Limbo is a state of uncertainty, neither here nor there, a place of neglect or position of irresolution. A religious news event will soon reveal the word's history, rooted in the Latin limbus, "border."
In Catholic theology, limbus infantum is the place appointed for infants who die without receiving baptism and limbus patrum for the souls of the righteous, including scriptural prophets, who died before the death of Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas held that they lived in a state of eternal happiness, on the edge of heaven. But unlike purgatory, where the faithful believe that the baptized dead could expiate their sins and proceed to heaven, many medieval theologians held there was no way out of limbus inferni, which translates as "the border of hell."
This struck many as unfair. The Scotsman newspaper reported that in an interview in 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now Pope Benedict XVI, said: "Limbo has never been a defined truth of faith. Personally, speaking as a theologian and not as head of the congregation, I would drop something that has always been only a theological hypothesis." Some theologians pointed out that it was a mistake to think of heaven as a place with a border rather than as a state of being.
An international commission has been meeting to advise the pope about "the fate of children who die without baptism." Whatever is decided will have an impact on the meaning of the word limbo.
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